Violet let the steaming barrel of the twelve gauge graze Rufus’s mouth.
Her eyes were glacial.
“I’m not going to ask if you know what you took from me.”
Her finger fidgeted with the trigger.
“All I want to do is cause you pain.”
“Do it,” he croaked.
The shotgun clicked.
Violet looked down at her trigger finger, incredulous, as though the digit had acted apart from her will.
“You took everything from me.”
She pressed the barrel into his face, pointed across the deck—a floating battlefield.
We could see three dead from where we stood, the crewman, the captain, and the passenger Rufus had executed.
“Why did you—”
“Because we could,” Maxine hissed, unable to produce anything louder than a whisper. She expelled a long breath, eyes enameling with death.
Her chin fell forward onto the grille.
Eyes rolling back in her head.
“Beautiful,” Rufus rasped, trying to turn his head. “Beautiful!”
I told him she was gone.
“Don’t you say that to me. You don’t…”
The old man closed his eyes and whimpered. His left hand was free. He reached over, felt his wife’s paling face, stroked her disheveled white mane.
“My joy,” he murmured, eyes redrimmed and leaking, voice strained, deflating with suffocation.
His last breath came like a sad sigh.
A half mile up the sound, blue lights flickered near the docks.
Violet looked so tired, so much older than a week ago, her clothes a shamble of ripped and soiled fabric.
“Violet.” The detective gazed up at me, pushed her dirty yellow hair from her green eyes, the sunrise lending false warmth to her pretty broken face. “I have to go.”
She dropped the shotgun, sat down on the deck, buried her head in her arms.
“You gonna be all right?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“They’ll take care of you.”
“Just wait a second.”
“I can’t.”
Leaning down, I kissed her forehead.
“Take care of your baby.”
And I headed for the starboard railing. It was a four foot drop to the water. I straddled it, glanced back at Violet—the tiny blond sitting at the bow, staring off toward the distant commotion on the docks, an eerie silence settling over the ferry, all quiet save the Stars and Stripes flapping from the mast.
I looked down into the dark water.
I jumped in.
The pain was exquisite.
I came up gasping, freezing saltwater stinging my burns.
Cormorants had congregated on a nearby sandbar, squawking, divebombing fish in the shallows. My howls scattered them into the waking sky.
The pain mellowed as I swam shoreward, my left arm aching with every stroke.
The south end of Hatteras lay before me, uninhabited, all marsh and beaches.
Halfway to shore I crossed a shoal, rose up shivering out of the water, standing kneedeep in the cold sea.
Something splashed behind me.
I turned, faced the Kinnakeet.
Violet resurfaced, legs thrashing, arms flailing, moving toward me with a gawky stroke that somehow kept her afloat.
At last she climbed up onto the shoal with me.
“What are you doing?” I asked through chattering teeth.
She was shivering so hard it took her a moment to find the words.
“They killed my husband.”
She was wet and she was crying.
Her breath smoking in the cold.
“What are you talking—”
“I saw him, Andrew! Max was hanging in this terrible room!”
She looked into my eyes with something akin to desperation, as though she were praying I would tell her a beautiful lie.
I wrapped my arms around her, our bodies trembling in the bitter dawn.
“I have nothing to go back to,” she said.
“You have family and friends and—”
“None of that works without him.”
I cupped her face in my hands.
“Tell me what you want to do, Violet.”
“I don’t know but everything’s changed. I can’t go home.”
She pulled away and glided off the shoal, beginning the last forty yards to Hatteras.
I followed her.
The sun lifting free of the sea, in full radiant bloom.
My head grew light.
My limbs cumbersome.
The world dim.
I slipped under, fought my way back to the surface, thinking, Next time just stay down.
Violet had reached the shore where she stood crying in the beach grass.
It finally registered.
She’d been made a widow, witnessed things that, outside of war, few people ever see.
Monsters had set her adrift in a lonely desert.
But I’d been there.
And I’d found a way out.
I could show her.
E P I L O G U E
I would like to unlock the door,
turn the rusty key
and hold each fallen one in my arms
but I cannot, I cannot.
I can only sit here on earth
at my place at the table.
—Anne Sexton, “Locked Doors”
N i n e M o n t h s L a t e r
VIOLET awoke.
She rubbed her eyes.
It was morning.
Max was cooing.
At the kitchen table in a threadbare flannel robe, Andrew sat hunched over a pile of pages, pencil in hand, scribbling corrections on his manuscript. He’d built a small fire in the hearth that had yet to drive the nightcold from her corner of the cabin.
The place smelled of strong coffee.
“Morning,” she said.
Andrew looked up through a tangle of shaggy hair.
“Morning.”
She crawled to the end of the bed, reached down into the crib, and picked up her son. As she lifted her undershirt, his little wet lips opened and glommed onto her brown nipple. Leaning back against the smooth timbers, she watched him nurse.
The infant gazing at its mother through shiny orbs.
Andrew got up from the table, started toward her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Violet shook her head.
“It’s all right. These are good tears.”
The pond was dark as black tea, steeped in tree roots, clear to the bottom, and rimmed by black spruce—a glade of water in the forest. Even in mid-August the pool carried a cold bite except at noon, in the middle, where sunlight reached all the way to the soft and silty floor. There, the sunbeams made a shaft of luminous green, warm as bathwater.
There, Andrew surfaced. He treaded naked, basking in the direct Yukon sun, contemplating how his autobiography should end, wondering if perhaps it should conclude here, in this pond in this valley at the foot of the mountains.